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This song may well have expressed sentiments very close to Fanny’s heart at the time. The longed-for one could very possibly have been Wilhelm who had been absent in Italy for several years and with whom Fanny’s mother had forbidden any correspondence other than through herself. The song bursts with longing for the awakening spring and the desire for the poet’s beloved and, for all its simplicity of form, these sentiments are powerfully communicated. The falling sixth in the vocal line which begins each of the first two musical phrases (with a rich secondary dominant chord in the piano), and the gentle interplay of major and minor throughout, beautifully describe the poet’s anticipation and yearning.

The autumn of 1823 was a particularly prolific time in Fanny’s song-writing. During the year she had been excluded from her brothers’ trip to Silesia and was becoming increasingly aware that certain opportunities were not open to her as a woman. She also, no doubt, missed her future husband, the Prussian court painter Wilhelm Hensel, who was in Italy. Among his friends in Rome was the author and poet Ludwig Tieck, who belonged to the Romantic circle in Jena and had translated Shakespeare with August Wilhelm von Schlegel. Perhaps it was no coincidence then that Fanny set seventeen of Tieck’s poems to music between 1822 and 1830. Ferne may reflect Fanny’s feelings of isolation at being left out of the Silesia trip and her loneliness at being separated from her beloved Hensel. A particularly striking moment occurs in the music at the end of each verse where the piano changes harmonies underneath a sustained vocal note, the resulting tension perfectly capturing the poem’s poignant despair.

By the bushes bordering the flower-bed
She picked roses for a wreath,
Full of fire their multitude shone
All around in dewy radiance.
Rose after rose fell into the basket,
Crimson and silvery white alike.

‘Tis true, the graces hold you sacred,
She sang, as you blossom there,
But why so speedily do you wilt and wither.
Those which only a moment ago stood open
Will soon by the wind be blown away.

You red-streaked bud:
Tremblingly you gaze into your grave,
And a pearly little drop hangs down like a tear.
Stay, in the sunshine you shall
Enjoy your fleeting life.

Delayed by deep thoughtfulness
The maiden wove the wreath
In the secrecy of the bower,
Full of love and tenderness.
And when she put the wreath unto her head:
O happy me, to come upon her then.

This is a song of courtship, and for all its pastoral simplicity there is also a touch of melancholy about it that reveals hidden depths. Fanny subtly alters the music in verses three and four (for instance at ‘Und ein perlendes Tröpfchen hängt als Träne herab’) to paint the young maiden’s sadness at the transience of the delicate blossoms and the happiness of the onlooker as he arrives in the garden to be with her. The text could be read as a metaphor for the girl’s feelings of anxiety at her impending loss of virginity and, on a personal level for Fanny, this loss might also have signified the end of her music, inspiration and identity.

Without doubt one of Fanny’s most inspired creations (she herself held it in especially high esteem), Die frühen Gräber is one of four poems by Klopstock which Fanny set to music. Time is magically suspended as a mood of deep thoughtfulness and reflection is echoed in the red glow of the evening. The extraordinary piano opening (in the warm key of A flat major) creeps into our consciousness rather like the moss on the overgrown graves of the poet’s youthful friends. The composer explores the middle and lower registers of the voice and keeps the accompaniment mainly in the lower half of the keyboard, at times resembling a Bach organ chorale with its expressive use of suspensions and four-part writing. In this way both the earthly and spiritual depths of feeling are conveyed in one seamless musical flow. Particularly successful in each strophe is the rising phrase beginning at ‘Du entfliehst? Eile nicht’ and the almost rarefied sense of calm in the vocal melisma at the end of each verse.

By the time she set this Klopstock poem, the twenty-three-year-old Fanny Mendelssohn had already been composing lieder for nine years (her songs had been published as part of her brother’s Op 8 in 1827). Die frühen Gräber is a text that Schubert himself set; the subject matter of the poem is poignantly applicable to both Schubert and Fanny Hensel, both of whose lives ended far too soon. It was composed on 9 October 1828, just over a month before Schubert’s death in Vienna. It is possible that Schubert had heard about the precociously gifted Mendelssohn children in Berlin; that they must have known about him is a matter of historical fact. Nevertheless, it would take some time for the Viennese musical model to triumph over its older Berlin counterpart. The influence in this gravely beautiful music is that of Carl Friedrich Zelter with a grandeur derived from Bach. This is also a gateway to the romanticized Gothic archaisms of a song like Schumann’s Im Rhein, im heiligen Strome from Dichterliebe. Although they were not aware of each other’s settings of this poem, both Schubert and Fanny Mendelssohn would have known the most famous song to this text by Christoph Willibald Gluck.

Enveloped by the perfumes of May,
Under the blossoming tree’s luminous shade
We see the embers of the evening clouds die away,
We await the rise of the full moon
And Philomel’s song in the bushes of the valley.

Balmy was the dusk,
And more confidingly we jested.
Mimicking gaiety soon falling silent,
In sweet thoughtfulness the maiden sat
And whispered, shall we go, and went not.

Johann Heinrich Voss had gained recognition through his 1781 translation of Homer’s Odyssey and both Felix and Fanny frequently set his poems, which possess a unique blend of classic and popular folk elements. This is a song full of the freshness of young love, the phrases continually striving upwards as if trying to float away from the earth. The lilting 9/8 metre gives the music spontaneity, and a joyful vocal melisma ends each of the verses—a feature often found in Fanny’s vocal writing.

This deeply Romantic poem has inspired several composers since it was first published—including Schubert and, most notably, Brahms who composed his immortal setting in 1866. There are so many similarities between Brahms’s and Fanny’s songs (the omission of the second verse, the key of E flat and use of a melisma on the last line) that one begins to wonder if Brahms might have known her setting. Fanny’s song is one of noble beauty and the exquisite piano sonorities seem to bathe the music in warm moonlight. This time her characteristic use of melisma in the vocal line is daringly expressive with its majestic sweep of a twelfth. The extraordinary leap of a minor tenth has a different intensity in each verse, most affectingly in the last as the poet turns away from the melancholic sound of the nightingale.

If only the little flowers but knew
How deeply my heart is wounded;
They would weep with me,
To sooth my pain.
If only the nightingales but knew
How sad and ill I am;
They would stop singing their happy
Exhilarating songs.

And if they knew my pain,
The golden panoply of stars;
They would come from on high
And console me.
But none of these can know it;
Only one can really know my pain –
It is she herself
Who has torn apart my heart.

Mendelssohn always maintained an incredibly close relationship with his family, and particularly with his sister Fanny. She was herself a talented musician and her premature death in 1847 dealt Mendelssohn such an acute emotional blow that he never really recovered and died himself only a few months later. Of the twenty-four songs published as Opp 8 and 9, six are by Fanny, who was particularly grateful to get into print at a time when female composers were considered strictly ‘amateur’. Although quite similar to Felix’s work (through Schumannesque marching rhythms) this setting has an individual character in its somewhat daring use of harmony and the final ‘resolution’ in the dominant key is a considerable stroke of poetic imagination.

In a peaceful convent garden
Walked a pale maiden.
The moon shone dimly down on her;
On her eyelashes were hanging
The tears of tender love.

“O how lucky for me
That my true love is dead!
Now I may love him once more:
He will become an angel,
And I could love an angel.”

She trod with timid steps
Towards the picture of the Virgin Mary;
It stood in an illuminated glow,
And, like a gentle mother,
It looked down on the pure one.

She sank to her feet,
And looked up in heavenly peace,
Until her eyelids
In death fell closed:
Her veil dropped down over her.

The second of two Fanny Mendelssohn settings, and a wistful, strangely distanced piece, wholly appropriate to the subject matter. The way the perpetual semiquaver motion is silenced for the last dying bars is extremely effective.